For an overview of what's changed in this release, see pod/perldelta.pod.
For the details of changes in previous releases, see the individual
perlNNNdelta.pod files. For example, pod/perl588delta.pod describes the
changes between versions 5.8.7 and 5.8.8.
For a list of contributors to perl, see AUTHORS.
If you need a detailed commit history (i.e. descriptions of each
individual commit), you can view the git version control history online
at http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git (follow the 'shortlog' link beside
the relevant tag). Or, you can download a copy of the git repository and
then run a command like
git log --name-status v5.12.0..v5.14.0
to view all the changes between 5.12.0 and 5.14.0.
See pod/perlgit.pod for more details on using git and accessing the
commit history.
In perl releases prior to 2009, the source tarball included a collection
of Changes files that listed the individual commits that had gone into
each release. Since these files had become very large, and since the
same information is now freely available online, it was decided to remove
them from subsequent releases.
If you need access to these removed files, then they can be be found most
recently in the 5.8.9 and 5.10.0 tarballs, at
http://www.cpan.org/src/perl-5.8.9.tar.gz
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.10.0.tar.gz
The contents of the files in question can mostly be regenerated using git
commands. The following table shows the equivalents. Note that the files
prior to Changes5.005 were not simple lists of commits, so can't be
recreated just by running the git command. As it happens, even the latter
ones are not exact equivalents. This is due to a combination of errors in
the original Changes files, and "impedance mismatches" when the previous
version control data was imported into git in December 2008.
For example, the Changes5.005 file includes 206 spurious entries from the
maint5.004 Perforce branch.
Running the following command with the range argument shown in the table
will produce *approximately* the same list of changes in the specified
file shown from the listed tarball.
git log --name-status
file tarball argument to 'git log'
------------ ------ --------------------------------
Changes5.000 Either N/A
Changes5.001 Either perl-5.000..perl-5.001
Changes5.002 Either perl-5.001..perl-5.002
Changes5.003 Either perl-5.002..perl-5.003
Changes5.004 Either perl-5.003..perl-5.004
Changes5.005 Either perl-5.004..perl-5.005_03
Changes5.6 Either perl-5.005_03..perl-5.6.0
Changes5.8 Either perl-5.6.0..perl-5.8.0
Changes5.8.1 5.8.9 perl-5.8.0..perl-5.8.1 ^1ede746b
Changes5.8.2 5.8.9 perl-5.8.1..perl-5.8.2
Changes5.8.3 5.8.9 perl-5.8.2..perl-5.8.3
Changes5.8.4 5.8.9 perl-5.8.3..perl-5.8.4
Changes5.8.5 5.8.9 perl-5.8.4..perl-5.8.5 ^3a81978b
Changes5.8.6 5.8.9 perl-5.8.5..perl-5.8.6 ^498d59dd
Changes5.8.7 5.8.9 perl-5.8.6..perl-5.8.7
Changes5.8.8 5.8.9 perl-5.8.7..perl-5.8.8
Changes 5.8.9 perl-5.8.8..perl-5.8.9
Changes 5.10.0 perl-5.8.0..perl-5.10.0